les illusions; que je m'etais creusee tous les abimes dans lesquels
j'etais tombee.

At other times she could see around her nothing but a mass of mutual
hatreds, into which she was plunged herself no less than her neighbours:

Je ramenai la Marechale de Mirepoix chez elle; j'y descendis, je
causai une heure avec elle; je n'en fus pas mecontente. Elle hait
la petite Idole, elle hait la Marechale de Luxembourg; enfin, sa
haine pour tous les gens qui me deplaisent me fit lui pardonner
l'indifference et peut-etre la haine qu'elle a pour moi. Convenez
que voila une jolie societe, un charmant commerce.

Once or twice for several months together she thought that she had found
in the Duchesse de Choiseul a true friend and a perfect companion. But
there was one fatal flaw even in Madame de Choiseul: she _was_
perfect!--'Elle est parfaite; et c'est un plus grand defaut qu'on ne
pense et qu'on ne saurait imaginer.' At last one day the inevitable
happened--she went to see Madame de Choiseul, and she was bored. 'Je
rentrai chez moi a une heure, penetree, persuadee qu'on ne peut etre
content de personne.'

One person, however, there was who pleased her; and it was the final
irony of her fate that this very fact should have been the last drop
that caused the cup of her unhappiness to overflow. Horace Walpole had
come upon her at a psychological moment. Her quarrel with Mademoiselle
de Lespinasse and the Encyclopaedists had just occurred; she was within
a few years of seventy; and it must have seemed to her that, after such
a break, at such an age, there was little left for her to do but to die
quietly. Then the gay, talented, fascinating Englishman appeared, and
she suddenly found that, so far from her life being over, she was
embarked for good and all upon her greatest adventure. What she
experienced at that moment was something like a religious conversion.
Her past fell away from her a dead thing; she was overwhelmed by an
ineffable vision; she, who had wandered for so many years in the ways of
worldly indifference, was uplifted all at once on to a strange summit,
and pierced with the intensest pangs of an unknown devotion.
Henceforward her life was dedicated; but, unlike the happier saints of a
holier persuasion, she was to find no peace on earth. It was, indeed,
hardly to be expected that Walpole, a blase bachelor of fifty, should
have reciprocated so singular a passion; yet he might at